Items Tagged: ESX

Working with the Taneja Group on the Customer Validation report was a true pleasure. We are very happy with how it turned out and have received numerous glowing praises on the quality of the work and value of the customer research findings. Many thanks for creating such an excellent demand generation resource, and for the webinar where you presented the findings of the report. Both assets have become very valuable tools for our demand generation efforts.

Building the Virtual Infrastructure with DataCore SANsymphony-V

There's a ball and chain hanging on your virtualization projects - and it's that pesky storage stuff. Storage that isn't flexible, can't adapt to changes, is wrapped with poor provisioning practices, and where sheer physicality and lack of abstraction seem to get in the way of every virtual server task. There's no secret in the fact we think storage virtualization can set the virtual infrastructure free, but let's take a look at one vendor's product, and how it tackles some of those issues in the Hyper-V infrastructure.

Having had the chance to spend some serious time with the latest StoreVirtual VSA (11.5) in Taneja Group's validation lab, I thought I'd share five tips that made my life a little easier, and may make your experience with it more productive.

EMC PowerPath: Optimized IO Multipathing for All Flash Arrays

All-flash arrays are changing the datacenter for the better. No longer do we worry about IOPS bottlenecks from the array: all-flash arrays (AFA) can deliver a staggering amount of IOPs. AFAs with the ability to deliver hundreds of thousands of IOPs are not uncommon. The problem now, however, is how to get the IOPS from the array to the servers. We recently had a chance to see how well an AFA using EMC PowerPath driver works to eliminate this bottleneck—and we were blown away. Most comparisons with datacenter infrastructure show a 10-30% improvement in performance; but, the performance improvement that we saw with PowerPath was extraordinary.

Getting bits from an array to server is easy —very easy, in fact. The trick is getting the bits from a server to an array in an efficient manner when you have many virtual machines (VM) on multiple physical hosts that are transmitting the bits over a physical network with a virtual fabric overlay; this is much more difficult. Errors can get introduced and must be dealt with, the most efficient path must be obtained and established, re-evaluated and reestablished continually, and any misconfiguration can produce less than optimal performance. In some cases, this can cause outages or even data loss. In order to deal with the “pathing,” or how the I/O travels from the VM to storage, the OS running on the host needs a driver, or in the case where multiple paths can be taken from the server to the array, a multipathing driver needs to be used to direct the traffic.

Windows, Linux, VMware and most other modern operating systems include a basic multipath driver; however, these drivers tend to be generic and not code optimized to extract the maximum performance from an array and come with only rudimentary traffic optimization and management functions. In some cases these generic drivers are fine, but in the majority of datacenters the infrastructure is overtaxed and its equipment needs to be used in the most efficient manner possible. Fortunately, storage companies such as EMC are committed to making their arrays work as performant as possible and spend a considerable amount of time and research to develop multipathing drivers optimized for their arrays. EMC invited us to take a look at how PowerPath, their optimized “intelligent” multipath driver, performed on an XtremIO flash array connected to a Dell PowerEdge R710 server running ESXi 6.0 while simulating an Oracle workload. We looked at the results of the various tests EMC ran comparing PowerPath/VE multipath driver against VMware’s ESXi Native Multipath driver and we were impressed—very impressed—by the difference that an optimized, multipath driver like PowerPath can make in a high IO traffic scenario.

Backup and recovery, replication, recovery assurance: all are more crucial than ever in the light of massively growing data. But complexity has grown right alongside expanding data. Data centers and their managers strain under the burdens of legacy physical data protection, fast-growing virtual data requirements, backup decisions around local, remote and cloud sites, and the need for specialist IT to administer complex data protection processes.

In response, Unitrends has launched a compelling new version of Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB): Release 9.0. Its completely revamped user interface and experience significantly reduces management overhead and lets even new users easily perform sophisticated functions using the redesigned dashboard. And its key capabilities are second to none for modern data protection in physical and virtual environments.

One of UEB 9.0’s differentiating strengths (indeed, the entire Unitrends product line) is the fact that in today’s increasingly more virtualized world, they still offer deep support for physical as well as virtual environments. This is more important than it might at first appear. There is a huge installed base of legacy equipment in existence and a lot of it has still not been moved into a virtual environment; yet it all needs to be protected. Within this legacy base, there are many mission-critical applications still running on physical servers that remain high priority protection targets. In these environments, many admins are forced to purchase specialized tools for protecting virtual environments separate from physical ones, or to use point backup products for specific applications. Both options carry extra costs by buying multiple applications that do essentially the same thing, and by hiring multiple people trained to use them.

This is why no matter how virtualized an environment is, if there is even one critical application that is still physical, admins need to strongly consider a solution that protects both. This gives the data center maximum protection with lower operating costs, since they no longer need multiple data protection packages and trained staff to run them.

This is where Unitrends steps in. With its rich capabilities and intuitive interface, UEB 9.0 protects data throughout the data center, and does not require IT specialists. This Product in Depth assesses Unitrends Enterprise Backup 9.0, the latest version of Unitrends flagship data protection platform. We put the new user interface through its paces to see just how intuitive it is, what information it provides and how many clicks it takes to perform some basic operations. We also did a deep dive into the functionality provided by the backup engine itself, some of which is a carryover from earlier versions and some which are new for 9.0.